Donna Haraway

History

Donna J. Haraway (born September 6, 1944 in Denver, Colorado) is currently a professor and chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States.

She is the author of Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Modest Witness@Second Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (1997, Ludwig Fleck Prize), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), and When Species Meet (2008).

Haraway earned a degree in zoology and philosophy at the Colorado College and received the Boettcher Foundation scholarship. She lived in Paris for a year, studying philosophies of evolution on a Fulbright scholarship before completing her Ph. D. in the Department of Biology at Yale in 1972.

She wrote her dissertation on the functions of metaphor in shaping research in developmental biology in the twentieth century.

The Cyborg Manifesto

In 1985, Haraway published an essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in Socialist Review. Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to feminist narratives of the twentieth century.
In "A Cyborg Manifesto", Haraway deploys the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialism. She also uses the cyborg metaphor to offer a political strategy for the seemingly disparate interests of socialism and feminism, writing, "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs"(p. 150). A cyborg is a: